by Aisling Ashbery

Created on: July 10, 2010   Last Updated: September 24, 2010

Though most modern poetry is written in free verse, it can be helpful for poets to have an understanding of metered verse even if they don’t choose to write in it.  After all, the more you know of the craft, the more options available to express your art.  When a poem is written in meter, it is helpful to know scansion to help you with mapping and analyzing the meter that you’re using.

What is scansion?

Scansion is a way to analyze and classify English meters in poetry.  It is done by marking a poem with stressed and unstressed syllables, and then analyzing the patterns that the different stresses make to find out which kind of meter you are using.

What do you mean by “stresses?”

When we speak in language, words are said to have stressed and unstressed syllables.  Though this binary system is not the only way to analyze stress patterns in language, it is one of the ones that seems to work best (and is most accepted) in English.  When scanning a poem, you mark stressed and unstressed syllables to discover what kind of feet you are working with.

How do I mark the stresses?

When scanning a poem, a strong stress is marked with an accent mark above the stressed part of the word.  A weak stress is marked with a small “u” shape above the unstressed part. Rests are marked with a triangle pointing up (with no closure underneath). Feet divisions are marked with a straight vertical line between the feet, and caesuras (or pauses) are marked with a double vertical line.

What are feet?

“Feet” are simply what we call the sections of the poetic line that are combined to make up the meter.  There are different kinds of feet depending on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that make them up.  Most feet are made up of two to three syllables.

What kinds of feet are there?

The four standard feet are:

*Iambic (n. iamb): An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable

*Anapestic (n. anapest): Two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable

*Trochaic (n. trochee): A stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. (Many trochaic lines will leave off their final unstressed syllable.  The technical term for such a line is “catalectic.”)

*Dactylic (n. dactyl):  A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables

Variations of standard feet:

*Spondaic (n. spondee): Two syllables in a row that have fairly equal strong stresses

*Pyrrhic (n.

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